Page 9:4 of the Sunday Times, Sunday 17th October 1993:
Snakes and laddersTIM WILLIS infiltrates the Snake Pit, a clique of funny men and powerhouse of media comedy.
Griff, for whom Clive used to write, is producing Angus at the moment . Clive and Angus are both doing things with Jimmy and Dan. John, who used to produce Griff, is now directing Rowan, as well as putting together a project with Douglas, Angus and Hugh. Peter, who represents Rowan and Harry, is producing Clive...
And the girls? Well, the girls are girlfriends and wives. The loose collaboration of the 200-300 writers, performers and producers who rule British broadcast comedy is by and large a boys' club. Still, as Griff likes to joke: "If you can't be in the right place at the right time, make sure your sister is. I got my first telly break because John was sleeping with mine."
And the Snake Pit - the nickname for these intertwined talents - was made to stick by a girl, Lise Mayer. (You know, she dated Rik, Rowan, Harry, Hugh, John and now Angus.) Naturally, she writes comedy scripts.
To introduce the characters in this one: John Lloyd is a director, the creator of Not The Nine O'Clock News, Blackadder and Spitting Image, and co-author of The Meaning Of Liff, with Douglas Adams. Adams is the author of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy (brought to TV by Lloyd). Griff Rhys-Jones and Rowan Atkinson are well known for their commercials. Peter Bennett-Jones is a producer and agent. The performers Clive Anderson, Hugh Laurie, Rik Mayall, Harry Enfield and Angus Deayton are near-neighbours of the above, as are the producers Dan Patterson and Jimmy Mulville.
Though many live in north London now, most of their stories begin at Oxbridge - most likely at Cambridge - in the 1960s, when Peter Cook and Co, followed by the Monty Python team, reinvented the universities' revue societies as the home of British satire. Treading in their Footlights through the mid-1970s, in the 1980s our heroes graduated to the Edinburgh Fringe and Radio 4, before passing through BBC Television to emerge in the 1990s as high flyers in the Birtist network of independent production companies, such as Hat Trick, responsible for Clive Anderson Talks Back (Mulville, Patterson), and Tiger, responsible for Clive Anderson In China (Bennett-Jones).
Along with the composer Phil Pope and the producer Geoffrey Perkins, they socialise together, or work together, or both - and have done ever since another of their number, Andre Ptashinski, producer of Forbidden Planet, ran the Oxford and Cambridge Theatre Company with Bennett-Jones, touring Rik Mayall across America and thus providing Mel Smith with the material for a screenplay-in-progress.
Mr Bean? Coltrane In A Cadillac? Vic Reeves's Funny Business? They're Tiger's. Dawn French's Murder Most Horrid? That's Talkback's, the company run by Rhys-Jones (who, incidentally, went to school with Adams). One begins to sniff another of those very British cliques that exist in every profession. But many of comedy's cream say the Snake Pit is a fiction, or else a tiny group they don't belong to.
Lloyd differs: "You just have to go to Lenny Henry's summer party to see that the Snake Pit exists. Just look at Peter's Friends [the film starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson]. That was produced by Martin Bergman, who used to do revue with Dan Patterson and Jimmy Mulville. Dan and Jimmy produced radio's On The Hour, by Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci, who are represented by Peter Bennett-Jones. It just goes on and on."
Lloyd is eager to stress that this network in meritocratic: "Rowan Atkinson went to Newcastle, for God's sake. He only did a year's electronics course at Oxford, and would have been funny wherever he came from." Enfield, Reeves, Mayall - the exceptions are witnesses for the defence. But inevitably there are murmurings in the industry.
"Them?" says one red-brick outsider. "You can't beat so you have to join them. But the ones before them, like John Cleese, and the ones after them, like Armando Iannucci, they're all a bunch of Oxbridge w***ers. I'm not saying they're not funny, but they can just stroll into Alan Yentob's BBC, because they all knew each other at college. They make you very aware they are intellectual, and they make it twice as hard for the women."
"All they do is gossip about each other," says another. "They used to compete for the Perrier award, now it's for a Bafta, and they're all so paranoid. Adams and Lloyd used to go into despair when one was doing better than the other."
Lloyd agrees that the Snake Pit is "claustrophobic, a lot of talent fighting for a very small space", but claims that should not give the impression British comedy is a bitchy little world providing jobs for college boys. "Look what people are interested in," he says. "It's One Foot In The Grave and Victor Meldrew. Cambridge Footlights doesn't dictate British comedy." And so says Rhys-Jones: "Being at university together didn't make us help each other up the ladder. It simply spurred us on. If one of your friends did well, you wanted to spite them - to do better."
Adams is less sure: "If people have worked together, there's a natural inclination to do so again, because you know each other." But Rhys-Jones is adamant: "It's not a case of how far we have all come together. It's a case of how far we haven't come together. We're still working with the same people as 10 years ago, doing the same things." But crucial to that, he claims, has been not working with his Footlights friends. "When you get out of university, the first thing you want to do is work with professionals."
"Having directed Griff since 1975, I can confirm that," says Lloyd - who is entitled to snipe. Even Rhys-Jones acknowledges that Lloyd was central to his generation's fortunes: "When we left university, the corridors of the BBC Light Entertainment were deserted. All those ex-cavalry officers and military policeman who had run the department were coming up for retirement, so David Hatch [who used to be in the Cambridge Circus revue with John Cleese] filled one of the empty desks with John Lloyd.
"Well, the 40-year-olds were burned out. But John was an eager beaver. He'd been a big fish in the small pond of Footlights, he didn't think it was difficult, and went on to create Hudd Lines, The News Quiz, Quote Unquote. On the strength of his success, the BBC had a huge recruitment drive at Oxbridge. In turn, these people devoured material, creating a need for more and more writers."
Not that it helped Adams: "In fact, John Lloyd was so keen not to be seen as nepotistical when I followed him out of Cambridge, that he was almost leaning over backwards not to employ me on the BBC."
It is no easier getting a definite line about the nature of comedy's inner circle from any of its members. But if there is a common thread in the Snake Pit's CVs, it is writing for radio, rather than hacking round the pubs and clubs. Take Weekending, which spawned The Mary Whitehouse Experience, which went to television and spawned Newman and Baddiel, who - surprise, surprise - both went to Cambridge...
Still, nobody should be too surprised that England's great universities provide such a disproportionate amount of talent. As Adams says: "You don't find yourself in Footlights and think: 'Oh, I'll go into comedy.' You go to Cambridge to get into Footlights and try to get into comedy." All (rarely) agree: what is most important is "the lack of hierarchy in the theatrical societies." According to Rhys-Jones: "There's no don in charge, everything is decided by the undergraduates. So you have to become expert in shenanigans and diplomacy - all the things that happen in the real world - to get in a show. And if you can't join someone else's, then you put on your own and try to bankrupt the opposition." Oxbridge, he says, "teaches you to pick up the phone, not just to wait for it to ring". But, he stresses - wheel on Jennifer Saunders, Paul Merton, Vic Reeves and the alternative wave of the past decade - an education there is not a prerequisite.
Jonathan James-Moore, head of BBC Radio Light Entertainment, has the proof: "When John and Griff were here, there were no female producers, and the trainees were all Oxbridge. This year, of the six trainee producers, none was Oxbridge and half were women." And what did he do at university? President of the Footlights, naturally. Still, while he acknowledges an Oxbridge caucus, he says its influence in waning. "They have been overtaken by events. The Edinburgh Fringe used to be dominated by them. Now they have been swamped by the professional cabaret circuit."
"Really, please give this an airing," says Rhys-Jones. "I want to make a programme on it myself." Starring Angus, no doubt, with music by Phil, and material from Geoffrey, if he has finished working with Dan on John's project for Rowan...
